Counter- propaganda and Citizen Journalism since 2014

Perhaps as her Christmas present, Sally McNair headlined a short piece on rough sleeping which was fair, accurate and even compared Scotland favourably with England and Wales! There’s always been something disturbingly likeable about Sally compared with Jackie or Glenn.

Anyhow, here’s what she said at 06:26 am:

‘Fewer people are sleeping rough in Scotland this winter compared to 5 years ago according to the homeless charity, Crisis. It says figures obtained through research at Heriot Watt University show a 6% drop in the number sleeping on the street between 2012 and 2017. That’s in stark contrast to the situation in England and Wales where increases of 120% and 63% were recorded over the same period. The Scottish government says it has made rough sleeping a priority and recently published a new action plan backed by £50 million in funding.’

I suppose door-stepping Kezia or that heartless Tory woman for comment is asking too much?

Let’s see if it’s repeated the usual six times this morning and whether it makes it to Reporting Scotland as the headline story and still as essentially good news.

Haha by 08:26am they’d added this to start off the report: ’16 hundred people will sleep rough in Scotland this Christmas!’

Meanwhile in the Guardian: “More than 24,000 people in Britain will spend Christmas sleeping rough or in cars, trains, buses or tents, says the charity Crisis. The figures suggest the number of rough sleepers in Britain has risen by 98% since 2010, while the number in tents and buses has increased by 103%. … The Crisis chief executive, Jon Sparkes, urged the Scottish government to urgently implement its plan to eradicate homelessness and said England and Wales must “step up urgently” with their own plans.”

So BBC Scotland’s figure of 1600 is only 6.6% of the U.K. total. You can no doubt see where I’m going with this! Sally could have started with telling us that: In Scotland, the number of rough sleepers is nearly a fifth less than in non-Scottish parts of the U.K. Chief executive of the charity Crisis is urging England Wales to implement plans similar to the Scottish Government.

I, too, almost choked on my cereal when I heard the report, because there was no sting in the tail. It was presented as a piece of information and presented Scotland positively.

The other thing which surprised me was that there was an interview with Mr John Crace, who is a sketch writer for the Guardian about how Mrs May and the UK Government ‘have been a boon to satirists’. Hayley Miller actually recommended listeners to check out some ‘hilarious’ websites and then played a long excerpt from one, presenting Mrs May as a ‘Gollum’ character (For those too young, he was one of the baddies in ‘The Lord of the Rings’, although he did give his life and saved ‘good’ against evil.)

On a slightly different vein, the New Statesman actually defended the Scottish Government’s proposed taxation from this week’s Scottish budget. The default line in the NS has always been Scotland and the SNP even baaaaaaader than Scottish Labour says. Maybe the plates are shifting ……. My Calvinist inner self is now chiding me for hubris – WE”RE DOOOOOMED, it is saying in the voice of John Laurie.